The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Job Description Kristine Kathryn Rusch I’ve received a lot of great questions this week, most of them related to time off, vacations, and managing family commitments. A few wanted to discuss the emotions of freelancing. All of these are important topics, but they skate around the periphery of the actual job itself. I knew, as I embarked on this project, that I’d be writing the Guide out of order. But my internal writer’s voice reminds me that we need a bit of bread and butter for a few weeks instead of dessert. So I’m going to get down to the nitty gritty parts of freelancing for a while. If you have questions about anything, please feel free to contact me through the website, or ask … Read entire article »

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Vacations Kristine Kathryn Rusch So last week, we discussed illness and the freelancer. The topic, which also dealt peripherally with taking time off, brought up two other time-off questions. I’ll answer the one that came in first, and leave the other for another section of the Guide. From Jas. Marshall: “When you’re a freelancer, how do you take a vacation? When you are your own toughest boss, and you’re pushing to produce more stuff so you can get paid, and so on…how do you justify even a single day off when ‘I could be editing that novel to get it out the door’ or whatever?” When that question came in, I knew I was in trouble. Because I’m trying to keep this as general as possible about freelancing, not … Read entire article »

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Illness Kristine Kathryn Rusch How do you know when you’re too sick to work? Seems easy enough to figure out, right? We’re all adults. We know when we’re sick. But for freelancers, that’s a tougher question than it seems. As I mentioned in the introduction, I suffer from a chronic illness. It reared its ugly head over the weekend. No one had sent me a question for this week, so I figured I’d use my own life experience to write this week’s post. We all get sick. The serious things—pneumonia, bronchitis, certain types of flu—leave us too ill to get out of bed. They’re not the problem to the freelancer. The milder illnesses are. When you work for someone else, it’s easy to know when to go into work. If you … Read entire article »